Land of Ice and Fire

Fire and ice.

hanks to the release of Al Gore's latest effort on global warming – this time in book and movie form – climate change is the hot topic in press rooms around the globe. It isn't the first time. The media have warned about impending climate doom four different times in the last 100 years. Only they can't decide if mankind will die from warming or cooling. As the noise from the controversy has inc...

Mercury: Planet of Fire and Ice

Mercury’s Exosphere: Mercury’s atmosphere, really an exosphere, is tenuous: The total mass of all known constituents is approximately 15 orders of magnitude less than Earth’s. An exosphere is an atmosphere that has such a low density that collisions between constituents are negligible. Thus, according to Smyth and Marconi, “Mercury has multiatmospheres, with each separate atmosphere forming ind...

Mercury: Planet of Fire and Ice

Land and Ice Applications of SeaWinds Data

While originally designed for wind vector measurements over the ocean, past and present scatterometers have been demonstrated to be effective for large scale monit’oring of the Earth’s land and ice surfaces. SeaWinds is the next generation of Ku-band scatterometers. The wide swath of SeaWinds enables much more frequent coverage of the Earth’s surface than has previously been possible. SeaWinds ...

Rapid switch-like sea ice growth and land ice–sea ice hysteresis

[1] Rapid and extensive growth of sea ice cover was suggested to play a major role in the sea ice switch mechanism for the glacial cycles as well as on shorter millennial scales [Gildor and Tziperman, 2000]. This mechanism also predicts a hysteresis between sea ice and land ice, such that land ice grows when sea ice cover is small and withdraws when sea ice cover is more extensive. The switch-l...